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Acting Ranking Member Lynch’s Opening Remarks at Hearing on the Trump Administration’s Dangerous and Extremist Immigration Agenda

June 12, 2025

Washington, D.C. (June 12, 2025). Below is Acting Ranking Member Stephen F. Lynch's opening statement, as prepared for delivery, at today's Full Committee hearing on the Trump Administration's favoring of an extremist immigration agenda over the safety of American children and families.
 

Opening Statement
Acting Ranking Member Stephen F. Lynch
Full Committee Hearing
"A Hearing with Sanctuary State Governors"
June 12, 2025

This very moment, as we sit in this hearing, and at the order of President Trump, the National Guard are on the streets of Los Angeles and active-duty Marines are on their way.

At Trump's order, Californians are now forced to navigate an active military zone as they try to go to work or decide if it's safe to send their kids to school.  And because of Trump, no American city or state is safe as he lays the groundwork to take his militarization playbook nationwide.  Two days ago, he confirmed that he is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military forces against civilians, preparing for a future in which dissent is met with armed force and the machinery of war is turned inward on the American people.  If unchecked, this marks not just a threat to our most sacred civil liberties, but a violent blow to American democracy itself.

Last week in LA, peaceful Americans came out to protest the Administration's cruel and illegal mass deportation operations in their neighborhoods.  President Trump inflamed events on the ground as an excuse to unleash the U.S. military on its own people.  Sending in 4,000 National Guard members without the approval of the Governor of California and deploying 700 active-duty Marines into an American city is meant to provoke, not pacify, and is an aggressive assertion of federal control where it is neither wanted nor needed.

Our Marines are often the first responders in a war zone.  But American neighborhoods are not war zones.  Protestors are not enemy combatants; they are Americans who have the constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak up.

The problem for President Trump and my colleagues across the aisle is that the American people hate what he is doing in Los Angeles to inflame tensions.  Americans are deeply concerned that the president deployed federal troops to an American city over the objections of state and local leadership and knowing it would escalate the situation.  He put members of the public, law enforcement officers, and troops in danger because he loves the images and theatrics of force.

Let's be clear; Democrats oppose violence and lawlessness in all its forms, as well as any threat to public safety.  President Trump himself is the worst offender. The chaos he is fomenting in LA is just an extension of his flagrant disregard for the Constitution and our rule of law and democracy.  It is clear that the Trump Administration's mass deportation policy is not limited to those that have committed serious and violent crimes, as they claim.  It also includes children who are U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status, and even international students.

On February 4, Trump deported a 10-year-old girl; a U.S. citizen, who was recovering from brain cancer.  While traveling to Houston for an emergency hospital visit, she was detained and deported with her undocumented parents and four siblings; three of whom were also born in the U.S.  Her parents have no criminal history.  What's going to happen to her, an American child, now that she can't see her expert doctors?

Trump deported another U.S. citizen child, a 2-year-old toddler from Fort Lauderdale, on February 21 to Brazil.  But because she is not a citizen or resident of Brazil, she had to enter the country as a tourist, which leaves her unable to access key programs like pediatric care and daycare or school. Are our cities safer now that she and her parents are gone?

In Austin, Texas, a husband and wife were recently detained after a routine traffic stop.  The husband was quickly deported, while the wife was released to pick up her three children from school, only to be deported with them several days later.  Two of those kids are U.S. citizens. Is this family the violent criminals Trump is supposedly saving us from?

The Trump Administration has tried to sweep aside the fact that its mass deportation operation is letting dangerous criminals roam free while it picks off peaceful, contributing members of our communities: busboys at restaurants, day laborers at Home Depot, parents who are taking their kids to school.

In late March, ICE agents wearing masks and hoodies detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national on a student visa to attend Tufts University.  A video of the incident shows Ozturk walking along a public street in Boston, Massachusetts, when several masked figures snatch her phone and backpack, handcuff her, and bustle her into an unmarked vehicle.

The Trump Administration is putting extremism, cruelty, and chaos above protecting kids and families.  Trump isn't focused on getting violent criminals off our streets; he's terrorizing our communities to fulfill deportation quotas with fathers and mothers, grandparents and kids.  

And he's trying to strongarm our city and state leaders to divert their limited resources away from serious public safety threats to instead focus on peaceful, law-abiding families, just as he has diverted federal resources away from combatting drug trafficking, violent crime, and terrorism to fuel his lawless mass deportation campaign.

Trump is not trying to protect us.  He's trying to divide us, pitting neighbor against neighbor.  But it's not immigrant kids who are about to kick millions of Americans off their health care to pay for tax breaks to billionaires.  And it's not immigrants who are using the military to silence Americans exercising their right to speak truth to power.

These are not the strong and measured actions of the leader of a free country; they are the ruthless maneuvers of an aspiring autocrat hell-bent on consolidating power by any means necessary.

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